How accurate is the picture of the human mind that has emerged from studies in neuroscience, psychology, and cognitive science? Anybody with an interest in how minds work - how we learn about the world and how we remember people and events - may feel dissatisfied with the answers contemporary science has to offer. Sensorimotor Life draws on current theoretical developments in the enactive approach to life and mind. It examines and expands the premises of the sciences of the human (...) mind, while developing an alternative picture closer to people's daily experiences. Enactive ideas are applied and extended, providing a theoretically rich, naturalistic account of meaning and agency. The book includes a dynamical systems description of different types of sensorimotor regularities or sensorimotor contingencies; a dynamical interpretation of Piaget's theory of equilibration to ground the concept of sensorimotor mastery; and a theory of agency as organized networks of sensorimotor schemes, as well as its implications for embodied subjectivity. Written for students and researchers of cognitive science, the authors offer a fuller view of the mind, a view better attuned to the experiences of people who live, work, love, struggle, and age, thrown into a world of meaningful relations they help create. Additionally, the book is of interest to neuroscientists, psychiatrists, and philosophers of science. (shrink)

This article argues that Tolstoy’s What Is Art? had a direct influence on David Foster Wallace’s conception of literature, and most specifically that Wallace appropriated Tolstoy’s discourse (down to most of its most specific details) to found his literary project. The article seeks to prove this by exhibiting the striking extent of Wallace’s alignment with Tolstoy’s beliefs, by retracing the multiple direct references to Tolstoy in Wallace’s work, and by uncovering Wallace’s annotations on his own copy of What Is Art? (...) as further confirmation of what a careful comparative analysis of the works of the two authors makes manifest. (shrink)

This article argues that Sartre’s “What Is Literature?” had a profound and direct influence on David Foster Wallace’s conception of literature. At the very least, a number of factors oblige scholars to take this interpretation seriously. We know that Sartre’s existentialism pervades Wallace’s fiction, that Wallace repeatedly mentioned the Existentialists throughout his work, that he’d learned French to read them in the original, and that Sartre was one of his favorites, as testified by Zadie Smith. Most importantly, a comparative analysis (...) of Sartre’s text and Wallace’s nonfiction shows not only striking parallels but also almost exact repetitions in the writers’ fundamental ideals. In this sense, Sartre’s direct influence on Wallace appears so major as to invest multiple specific details of Wallace’s conception of literature both in its content and in the logical structuring of that content. In this article, we explore the extent of this influence through a structured investigation of its multiple features, showing that many of Wallace’s tenets – the rejection of Realism, the affirmation of meaning-as-use and of literature as a means to human communion and individual and social engagement, and many many more – follow from Sartre’s discourse. (shrink)

In this paper we study |$\mathcal{M}\mathcal{V}^{+}$|⁠, i.e. the positive fragment of Łukasiewicz infinite-valued Logic |$\mathcal{M}\mathcal{V}$|⁠. Using mainly algebraic techniques we characterize all the finitary extensions of |$\mathcal{M}\mathcal{V}^{+}$| that are structurally complete and those that are hereditarily structurally complete.

What were the earliest reactions to Gödel's incompleteness theorems? After a brief summary of previous work in this area I analyse, by means of unpublished archival material, the first reactions in Vienna and Berlin to Gödel's groundbreaking results. In particular, I look at how Carnap, Hempel, von Neumann, Kaufmann, and Chwistek, among others, dealt with the new results.

The aim of this article is to understand an important passage in the history of the sciences of the psyche: starting from the psychiatric problematization — and the consequent emergence — of the concept and the object called ‘sexuality’ in the second half of the 19th century, it attempts to show a series of continuities and discontinuities between this kind of reasoning and the birth of psychoanalysis in the first years of the 20th century. The particular focus is therefore directed (...) on two texts: Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis and Freud’s Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. The argument runs along three intertwined axes: (1) an historico-epistemological analysis of the concepts and their transformations in the field of the science of sexuality; (2) an analysis of the power relationships between patients and physicians; and (3) an account of the psychiatric technologies of the self that have as an effect the emergence of new forms of ‘objective’ knowledge of the subject. The broader goal is to trace a map of the simultaneous and correlate coming into being and transformations both of new forms of objects and of new forms of subjects through the mediation of scientific concepts and techniques. (shrink)

According to the quantificational Quinean model in meta-ontology, the question of ontology boils down to the question of whether a sortal property is exemplified. I address some complications that arise when we try to build a philosophical reconstruction of the link between individuals and kinds displayed in the exemplification relation from the point of view of conceptualism about kinds and having in mind this stand in ontology. I distinguish two notions of resemblance, object-to- object and object-to- kind, and show the (...) problems with both of them. Finally, I argue for a better awareness of the implicit "bias" involved in the very notion of "resemblance," without indulging in Quine's veto toward this notion. (shrink)

The publication of Guido Calabresi’s book “The Future of Law and Economics” has drawn a substantial amount of attention among law and economics scholars. We thought that the best way to devote special attention to this book was to devote a Special issue to it. This article situates Calabresi’s book among other reflections on the future of the discipline, introduces and explains the reasons behind this Special issue and discuss the organization and content of it. -/- We emphasize how Calabresi’s (...) historical-conceptual standpoint allows him to isolate the stakes of different future developments around the question of how could further appreciation of legal institutions that defy the standard economic assumptions help the field develop theoretically. Overall, the contributors all shared Calabresi’s attempt to restore the balance between Law and Economics and the need to better account for the “whole unanalysed experience of human race”, often neglected by the Economic Analysis of Law approach. Most disagreements are about the ‘how’. In any case, the search for the Law and Economics ‘not (yet) taken’ or for other “Law and … ” approaches is always open to the Future. (shrink)

In Italien erlangte Hans Jonas, ähnlich wie in andersen Ländern, öffentliche Anerkennung dank seines Werks Das Prinzip Verantwortung, das 1990 ins Italienische übersetzt wurde. Die Übersetzung weckte das Interesse einer breiten Öffentlichkeit sowohl an seinem bioethischen Ansatz als auch an seinen früheren philosophisch-biologischen Schriften. Die Besonderheit des italienischen Kontexts besteht jedoch darin, dass der Philosoph in der akademischen Welt bereits lange vor seiner eingangs erwähnten allgemeinen Anerkennung und ›Entdeckung‹ in der Öffentlichkeit durch seine Arbeiten über die spätantike Gnosis gut bekannt (...) war. (shrink)

This brief paper presents an Aristotelian-inspired approach to end-of-life decision making. The account focuses on the importance of teleology, in particular, the telos of eudaimonia understood as the goal of human flourishing as well as the telos of medicine when a person’s eudaimonia is threatened by serious illness and death. We argue that an Aristotelian bioethics offers a better alternative to a “fundamentalist bioethics” since the telos of eudaimonia offers a more realistic conception of the self and the realities of (...) frailty and mortality, provides a more objective basis for making decisions regarding end-of-life treatment and care, and is better able to resist the pull of the Technological Imperative. In addition, this teleological concept is flexible enough for it to be employed in multicultural and pluralistic societies. (shrink)

In this paper, I contend that both Hegel’s and Heidegger’s philosophies can be regarded as attempts to overcome Cartesian subjectivism and to by-pass traditional oppositions between subjectivist and objectivist accounts of the ‘I.’ I explore Hegel’s notion of the ‘I,’ stressing how Hegel takes up Kant’s ‘I-think,’ freeing Kant’s philosophy from its subjectivism. Then, I submit that Heidegger, in the twentieth century, was similarly concerned with the overcoming of subjectivism, and that an analysis of his notion of mineness and its (...) development in the context of Heidegger’s thought can support this argument. Finally, I suggest that Hegel’s and Heidegger’s analyses can be used to elaborate an alternative and more flexible model of the ‘I,’ which avoids individualism, allows thinking of the formation of the self as a collective enterprise, and thus provides the conceptual resources to transform our identity without losing it. (shrink)

Do we really need philosophy? The present collection of jargon-free essays aims at answering the question of why philosophy matters. Each essay considers the central question from different angles: the unavoidability of doing philosophy, the practical consequences of philosophy, philosophy as a therapy for the whole person, the benefits of philosophy for improving public policy, etc.

Most human thinking is thoroughly informed by context but, until recently, theories of reasoning have concentrated on abstract rules and generalities that make no reference to this crucial factor. _Perspectives on Contexts_ brings together essays from leading cognitive scientists to forge a vigorous interdisciplinary understanding of the contextual phenomenon. Applicable to human and machine cognition in philosophy, artificial intelligence, and psychology, this volume is essential to the current renaissance in thinking about context.